Hagley Historical and Field Society

As part of our Fiftieth Birthday celebrations we decided to invite some of our regular speakers to return and in June it was the turn of Ned Williams, making his fifth appearance.  Ned never fails to delight and his talk on the use of corrugated iron in architecture was a tour de force.  We started with a look at some of the nineteenth century catalogues of the kits available to build iron buildings on wooden frames and then looked at some of the specific uses to which they were put – houses, isolation hospitals, schools, tabernacles, village halls, cinemas, shops, dance halls and cricket pavilions all featured.  Ned delighted his audience with his unique delivery and a plethora of more recent photographs that we were able to compare with the catalogue illustrations.  Participants in Jeff Cope’s walk around industrial Blakedown on the following Sunday were keenly noting any corrugated iron structures!

Later in the month a group travelled by coach to Worcester for a fascinating behind-the-scenes tour of The Hive, the new home of the County Archive & Archaeology Service.  Such was the interest that many had to be prised away to move on to our afternoon visit to the Elgar Birthplace Museum, preceded by an excellent lunch.